What is our primary use case?
My main use case for Yellowbrick Data Warehouse is day-to-day activities such as checking the database system health and ensuring the data warehouse is healthy and available. Every morning, my first responsibility is to check whether the warehouse is available, whether the database connection is working, and whether all expected processing resources are healthy, and to identify any hardware and system alerts. I also check for any unusual resource utilization patterns and whether users are experiencing connection problems.
I typically investigate and resolve unusual resource patterns or connection issues by monitoring the active queries, which is an important responsibility for me as a DBA for Yellowbrick Data Warehouse. I need to check which queries are running, which queries are taking too long, and which queries are consuming significant resources. I look for queries waiting in the queue, blocking, or competing for resources, and I check which applications are generating heavy workloads. Yellowbrick Data Warehouse provides system views and Workload Management (WLM) information that I use to investigate query activity.
I also identify the query, check its execution state, including CPU or IO consumption, examine the query plan, identify expensive joins or scans, review resource pool allocation, and compare the current execution to historical performance.
How has it helped my organization?
Yellowbrick Data Warehouse positively impacts my organization by helping me diagnose issues more quickly, which saves us a lot of time.
For example, there was recently an overnight ETL process that normally loads around 50 million records, but on that day, the load was only about 10 million. Yellowbrick Data Warehouse helped me review the load process, including the error logs, the source availability, the rejected records, and the destination table's counts. This helped me identify whether the issue was with the source, the transformation network, or the Yellowbrick Data Warehouse loading process.
What is most valuable?
The best features Yellowbrick Data Warehouse offers include workload management, which helps me see how different workloads are available on warehouse resources. It is very helpful for executive dashboards, ETL data loads, and ad-hoc analysis queries.
Workload management helps me keep dashboards, ETL loads, and ad-hoc queries from affecting one another in practice by showing me how to find the problems. It allows me to monitor the resource pools, review the queries and quick queries, monitor resource consumption, set workload priorities according to business requirements, and investigate resource contention. It is also very helpful for security management because it is my responsibility to ensure users have appropriate access. My typical responsibilities include creating database users, creating roles, granting permissions, and revoking unnecessary permissions.
Yellowbrick Data Warehouse also receives a large volume of data from external systems, such as SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Hevo Data, Informatica, Python ETL applications, and cloud storage. It is easy to monitor whether the data loads successfully, as Yellowbrick Data Warehouse provides me with the YBLoad utility as a bulk loading mechanism.
The accuracy and reliability of the output from Yellowbrick Data Warehouse are positive, and so far in my experience, it has been very helpful.
What needs improvement?
Yellowbrick Data Warehouse can be improved by cooperating with new upcoming technologies, such as those in cloud terms or AI.
Upgrading is necessary, but I do not have anything more to add at this point.
Regarding the AI capabilities of Yellowbrick Data Warehouse, I think they need more of an upgrade in governance and security.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Yellowbrick Data Warehouse for more than four years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I believe Yellowbrick Data Warehouse is stable, and I trust that it is more stable, as we have always checked its lower versions.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The scalability of Yellowbrick Data Warehouse is better because there is always a way to improve, and it is quite secure and easy to use.
How are customer service and support?
I believe customer support is all positive. We have only needed to ask customer service for support one time, and that experience was good.
I would rate customer support a 10.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We have not previously used a different solution.
What was our ROI?
I have seen a return on investment, particularly in terms of time saved.
Per issue, I can say that it saves time because we work on many projects and are involved in different projects almost daily and weekly, so it is a day-to-day tool we use on our team.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The pricing, setup cost, and licensing details are not under my approval, but that is the manager's responsibility.
I think the pricing and licensing seem reasonable for the value because I have not heard any negative feedback about it. In fact, it seems to be cheaper for companies to use.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Before choosing Yellowbrick Data Warehouse, we did not really evaluate other options, but for monitoring purposes, we also used Redgate Monitor tools, which are not directly similar, although I can see some connection.
What other advice do I have?
On a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate Yellowbrick Data Warehouse an eight.
The reason I give it an eight is that it is a good rating in my opinion, and I have to leave space for improvement.
The cloud providers we use are Amazon AWS and Azure.
My recommendation to others reading reviews on PeerSpot is to try Yellowbrick Data Warehouse if they are in a field related to data, as I am sure they are going to love it.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Hybrid Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
